A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,32
thinking that she just wanted to read the damn magazine. Couldn’t the three of them play together for fifteen minutes without her?
She shaded her eyes. Moira’s suit was riding up her bottom, while the top was completely askew. It had looked so cute on the rack, but now, with Moira wearing it, the bikini looked like an attempt to age her, even, possibly, to sexualize her. Tomorrow she would wear the one-piece.
“Moira!” she called. “Come fix your swimsuit.” Moira reluctantly trotted toward her.
“Thank God,” Ronan said. “Hey, Da!” and then Elm stopped paying attention. Why hadn’t she paused there, cementing the scene in her memory. Why hadn’t she called both her children to her? She fixed Moira’s suit and took her up the beach behind the dune to pee, the sand so blindingly white that everything was filtered, hazy. Elm recalled being surprised when the beach abruptly ended in a row of palm trees; what stretched behind was dirt, reminding her of the empty scenery of a movie studio backlot. That’s what had saved the two of them, the higher ground. Elm remembered screaming, covering her eyes as if watching a horror movie. Then, as the wall of water moved closer, she grabbed Moira.
She wasn’t sure if she had passed out or if she had blocked the memory. The next thing she could piece together was that Moira was crying, screaming, the cut on her leg angry and bleeding. The water that had carried them into the trees that lined the shore receded just as quickly. All around her people were yelling, in pain, in search of loved ones … And she registered the fact that Colin was not with her. She prayed that he had grabbed Ronan the way that she had grabbed Moira. Or, rather, she hoped he had. She forgot to think about God. The moment she most needed to believe in all her life, and she didn’t think about Him. And Ronan’s death was proof, she believed, that God didn’t exist. No God would take a child, just snatch him away with the claw of a wave.
The hospital was postapocalyptic—writhing bodies and shocked tourists, wailing Thais and overwhelmed hospital staff. Elm found gauze and peroxide and dressed Moira’s wound herself. She poured the liquid onto her leg and Moira was reduced to infancy, screaming wordlessly, face red with anger. When they got back to Bangkok, and for three months afterward, Moira returned to wearing diapers, though she was close to four years old. It was not surprising, said the psychiatrist they consulted, and she would regain her lost maturity.
Colin was rushing through the wings, peering into every bed to see if he recognized the wounded. He almost ran into Elm before he grabbed her by the arms and looked into her eyes. They both realized that Ronan was gone, and Elm moaned slightly, a foreign high-pitched whine.
Then she joined him in a frantic search. They hitched a ride to another hospital and looked there. Moira fell asleep and grew heavy in Colin’s arms. She woke up hungry at a third hospital, and Elm accepted God-knows-what that someone handed her to eat.
Bodies were piled up in a row alongside the elementary school. Elm refused to look. Colin let his eyes glaze over; he looked only at height until he saw someone about Ronan’s size. Then he would look at the hair. Only if it was sandy blond, a little too long in back, would he look at the face. He didn’t find Ronan.
Moira began to throw up and retched constantly all through the night. The next morning she looked pale and shrunken. Her skin was sagging and Elm could see she was dehydrated. Elm and Moira got in line for transport to Bangkok, a snake of dazed, disheveled tourists in bright sarongs. Most were barefoot; some wore a single sandal. All had mud in their hair, beneath their nails, streaked across their backs.
“I swear I will find him,” Colin said. It was the first sentence he’d uttered in three days that didn’t involve a description of Ronan or a directive to a stunned Elm. “I will bring him with me and we will meet you in Bangkok. Check in at the embassy and I’ll find you there.”
Inside the cargo plane, strangers huddled together for warmth. Moira had stopped throwing up, but now fluid was leaking from the other end in a consistency that reminded Elm of the meconium babies emit the first two days of their lives